Million Dollar Quartet

[sam]

Saw the play Million Dollar Quartet last night and will add to all reviews that the show is more than just a play, it was concert with a play built into it! Got free front row center tix from a friend and Elvis gave his guitar pick to my son at the show end.

This was on Broadway and an Emmy winning show in 2008 and has been touring since then. Any one else here seen it, and what didja think?

For those not familiar with the play or the significance, here is the general synopsis:

"Million Dollar Quartet" is a recording of an impromptu jam session involving Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash made on December 4, 1956, at the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. An article about the session was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title "Million Dollar Quartet". The recording was first released in Europe in 1981 as The Million Dollar Quartet with 17 tracks. A few years later more tracks were discovered and released as The Complete Million Dollar Session. In 1990, the recordings were released in the United States as Elvis Presley - The Million Dollar Quartet. This session is considered a seminal moment in rock and roll.

Last night's show had great players and no one over played their part, even Jerry Lee Lewis. Carl Perkins character played a Les Paul Studio through a Blues Jr, and the "session" bass player played a stand up bass through an Ampeg amp. Some set pics below. They did not allow pictures during the show.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/YX3bH6][img]http ... .jpg[/img]million 1 by asatsam, on Flickr[/url]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/YEjhgw][img]http ... .jpg[/img]million 2 by asatsam, on Flickr[/url]

[url=https://flic.kr/p/YEjhg1][img]http ... .jpg[/img]million 3 by asatsam, on Flickr[/url]

Highly recommended if it comes to a town near you.

Famous picture taken by Sam Philips, the girl on the right was a singer girlfriend of Elvis Marilyn Evans
[url=https://flic.kr/p/YX4NAg][img]http ... .jpg[/img]million 4 by asatsam, on Flickr[/url]

More detailed story of the session here:
The jam session seems to have happened by pure chance. Perkins, who by this time had already met success with "Blue Suede Shoes", had come into the studios that day,[1] accompanied by his brothers Clayton and Jay and by drummer W.S. Holland, their aim being to record some new material, including a revamped version of an old blues song, "Matchbox". Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, who wanted to try to fatten this sparse rockabilly instrumentation, had brought in his latest acquisition, Jerry Lee Lewis, still unknown outside Memphis, to play piano (at the time, a Wurlitzer Spinet) on the Perkins session. Lewis' first Sun single would be released a few days later. Sometime in the early afternoon, 21-year-old Elvis Presley, a former Sun artist now with RCA Victor, arrived to pay a casual visit accompanied by a girlfriend, Marilyn Evans.[2]

After chatting with Phillips in the control room, Presley listened to the playback of Perkins’ session, which he pronounced to be good. Then he went into the studio and some time later, the jam session began. At some point during the session, Sun artist Johnny Cash, who had recently enjoyed a few hit records on the country charts, arrived as well. (Cash wrote in his autobiography Cash that he had been first to arrive at the Sun Studio that day, wanting to listen in on the Perkins recording session.) Jack Clement was engineering that day and remembers saying to himself "I think I'd be remiss not to record this," and so he did. After running through a number of songs, Elvis and girlfriend Evans slipped out as Jerry Lee pounded away on the piano. Cash wrote in Cash that "no one wanted to follow Jerry Lee, not even Elvis." Whatever Elvis' feelings may or may not have been in regard to "following" Lewis, Presley was clearly the "star" of the impromptu jam session, which consisted largely of snippets of gospel songs that the four artists had all grown up singing. The recordings show Elvis, the most nationally and internationally famous of the four at the time, to be the focal point of what was a casual, spur-of-the-moment gathering of four artists who would each go on to contribute greatly to the seismic shift in popular music in the late 1950s.

During the session, Phillips called a local newspaper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Bob Johnson, the newspaper’s entertainment editor, came over to the studios with UPI representative Leo Sora with photographer George Pierce. Johnson wrote an article about the session, which appeared the following day in the Press-Scimitar under the headline "Million Dollar Quartet". The article contained the now-famous photograph of Presley seated at the piano surrounded by Lewis, Perkins and Cash (the uncropped version of the photo also includes Evans, shown seated atop the piano).

Set list was:
I Shall Not Be Moved
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On
Blue Suede Shoes
Sixteen Tons/ My Babe
Hound Dog
Folsom Prison Blues
I Hear You Knocking
Brown Eyed Handsome Man
Memories Are Made of This
See You Later, Alligator
I Walk the Line
Ghost Riders In The Sky (Made Famous By Elvis Presley…
Long Tall Sally
Real Wild Child
Peace in the Valley

[DanDoulogos]

First I've heard of the show - but I had heard about the million dollar quartet before.

Sounds like it was a very entertaining evening. Thanks for posting this, it was a good read.

[john o]

Interesting stuff, sounds like a great show. I enjoyed watching the TV mini-series "Sun Records" last Spring re: the early dynamics of these same musicians. I was unaware of the million dollar session, Thx for the review!